1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information distribution apparatus and an information distribution method with respect to a billing method at a time of distributing information, an information receiving apparatus and an information receiving method, and an information receiving and distributing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, various kinds of information (hereafter, referred to as contents) are in circulation with the advance of the multimedia industry. These contents have come to be provided by way of, for example, a communications satellite, radio communication, cable communication such as CATV (the cable television) and an information distribution service (hereafter, referred to as service) using the internet and the like. With the service, a so-called predetermined billing has been carried out corresponding to the provided contents. With a conventional service, music information and image information as part of audio information and video information are transmitted to a user on the receiving side (hereafter, referred to as user) with a predetermined format. At this time, although there has been a service whereby to reflect a difference in transmission systems of contents data as to whether the contents are transmitted by an analog system or a digital system on the amount of billing, sound quality, image quality and genre (classification) of these music information and image information have never been reflected on the above-mentioned amount of billing and as a result, the amount to be billed has been fixed.
However, a preference of the user is diverse, which means that there is a case where a user does not care about a quality of some contents, but wants them to be provided cheaply, or a case where the user wants to be provided the highest quality of other contents however expensive they are. Therefore, with the conventional service, it is impossible to answer these requests under the present circumstances.
Therefore, an object of the present invention is to solve the above-mentioned problems and propose an information distribution apparatus and an information distribution method, an information receiving apparatus and an information receiving method, and an information receiving and distributing method which are capable of carrying out the billing of the side to which information is provided based on a value standard for the provided information.
According to an aspect of the present invention, there is provided an information distributing apparatus for billing and distributing information, which is characterized by comprising an adding means for adding a value standard to said information based on a predetermined standard, a billing means for carrying out a billing based on said value standard for said information, and a distributing means for distributing said information billed by said billing means.
According to the present invention, in the information distributing apparatus, the adding means adds the value standard to the information based on the predetermined standards. The value standard added to the information by the adding means is referred to at a time of billing the information distributed by the distributing means. The billing means bills the information based on the value standard.